Of course it's shiney... it's Chrome!

Well for just under the past month I have only opened up Internet Explorer on my computer about 1/2 a dozen times... and no.. it's not cause I have banned myself from using the Internet... I have made the migration to Google Chrome.

Google Chrome is Googles new offering to the web browser market, and was released not so long ago as a beta release that you can download from their website.

I must say that for an initial beta release, Chrome is already an incredibly stable, and feature rich piece of software, and when it becomes more mature I think will give the Firefox browser a run for its money... and cause everyone already knows and loves Google... may tempt some of the long time devoted Internet Explorer users over.

So it's a web browser... How much could Google actually do to improve a web browser?

Well lets see... here are some of Chromes features I like:

One of my superiors is well known for here motto "less is more" and Google has taken that approach with Chrome. Both IE and Firefox offer you a barrage of buttons to click up in your top toolbar... by default, Chrome offers only 5:

• Back
  
• Forward
  
• Reload
  
• Page Settings
  
• Settings
  

And that is it... no file, edit, tools, menu's ect.

Chrome devotes as much space to the actually website you are visiting as it can, so less up the top, and no status bar down the bottom.

One of the best features, and the thing that makes me really love Chrome, is where the newer versions of IE and firefox have the address bar, then a search box where you can search the Internet directly, Chrome merges these into one bar.

In a single text bar, you can type a url to vist a site directly, or enter a search term to search your favourite search engine with (it does not have to be Google), search your Internet searching history, bookmarks ect.

Tabs... yes they are cool, Firefox has used tabs for yonks, and IE finally came on board with tabs in IE7, so we all know how good it can be to have multiple websites open in a single window. The biggest advantage Chrome has is that each browser tab is independent, so if you visit a website that crashes the tab, only that one tab dies, and your whole browser does not crash as it would with Firefox or IE. The flip-side of this however, is because each tab is running independently, if you have many tabs open, Chrome can become quite resource hungry and eat up a fair bit of RAM.

What happens when you open a new tab? Each time you open a new tab, Chrome has a little page it displays in the tab that gives you little screenshots of all your most visited pages, and a list of all your latest bookmarks... making it very easy to return to some of your favourite sites.

Another cool feature with tabs.... you can rearrange the order they appear in, by simply clicking and dragging the tab to the order you want it in... simple, but makes life easy if you have 10+ tabs open and are constantly jumping between a few of them.

So overall... Do I like it? Yep... Love it, and won't be going back to IE or Firefox at the minute.

As it is still a beta release, there a few little bugs, I have found some CSS renders a little odd sometimes, but overall is pretty good. At the minutes, if you open an RSS feed directly in the browser it just displays as a heap of unformatted text, but hey, you can do all the important stuff.